Steven's Home Page - ホームページ: July 7th Autocross and MaxQdata Logger

Last Sunday was the 2nd race of Oahu's 2007 Autocross season and it was a virtual Miata Lovefest - with the most Miatas I've ever seen in one place. They were so many in all classes every which way you looked!!!

(thanks jon&erin for the action pics)

And...I finally got to use my MaxQdata logger "for real"...for the first time. Although it would sometimes register 40 to 60 mph without even moving...blue tooth problems???...it pretty much ran well enough to my satisfaction. Here is the plot of my final and fastest run of the day:

If you asked me what 1 lateral G felt like before, I would have no idea...but now I know. On this right hand sweeper my brother's eunos (the small red "x") was pulling almost 1 G (0.97Gs actually) steady state at almost 33mph. According to the data, the fastest speed I hit during the run was 40mph...which is surprising cause it feels a lot faster when your actually driving. The slowest speed was 22mph at 0.93Gs at the tight right hand U-turn at the bottom of the course. One some of the transitional turns, I got up to 1.05Gs, but these are not really steady state.

At almost 1G on that first right hand sweeper, the G force actually makes shifting difficult as your totally slammed against the door the second you take your hand off the steering wheel to make the 1st to 2nd shift!!!

Since the data is only logging at 5 times per second (60 hertz?), it's pretty difficult to see differences of less than 0.2 seconds...although, larger difference are very easy to see. In this plot, I overlayed my fastest run and my slowest run and this was the difference in the end:

32.945 (the blue "x") was my fastest run, versus my slowest at 34.218 (the red "x")...as you can see, I forgot to look ahead far enough ahead on the run down to the U-turn and really "altered" my line...and ran over a cone...

At the end of the day, I also did 2 fun runs in the eunos and could not better my 32.9 run...BUT, I did accomplish something I wasn't sure I could really do...I went back down to 1st gear in the bottom U-turn using the heel-toe downshift technique. I must say that doing that stuff at race speeds is MUCH easier than trying to practice at pedestrian driving speeds...I guess the synchros just don't mesh well at non-racing speeds...

During the fun runs, I also got to run my brothers 6-wagon with the data logger. With his all-season tires and stock suspension, the most Gs I could pull were 0.75 in steady state and 0.83 in the transitions, with a top speed of 36.5mph and a low speed of 20mph.

One thing good about fun runs is it gives you more seat time...and although I couldn't improve my fastest time, my brother finally got "it" on his last fun run. What he got was the looking ahead part...and he bettered his best time by over 1 second!!! Good habits to have for the next race...

RESULTS: As far as placing goes, I got dusted again by in CSP by a good 2.5 seconds by the same M3 and a MR2 that beat me last time...Results http://www.sccahawaii.org/7-1-07.pdf I'm guessing I shouldn't feel THAT bad getting beat though... since they did have the 2nd and 3rd fastest times OVERALL!!! I'll need to track how close I can get to those guys in future races...